The mobile industry has experienced a period of exceptional growth during the last several years. As the next generation of mobile network growth evolves, a multitude of services will be offered, discovered, and consumed whereby rich content as well as voice, will be transported throughout a combination of mobile and internet environments, using an integrated IP network layer.
An All-IP network enables seamless network integration of different access options, e.g., broadband, mobile Internet, fixed Internet, and existing mobile systems, into a single IP layer. As such, all communication services may be carried over a single network infrastructure, thus enabling the integration of voice, data, and multimedia services. Carriers on the All-IP networks will glean a number of important benefits as well, including cost savings, scalability, flexibility, efficient network operations, and new revenue opportunities.
The number of services that will become available as a result of this seamless network integration is expected to grow enormously. Besides the classical services, such as those offered by printers, scanners, and fax machines, other network services such as information access, music on demand, and computational infrastructure services deployed within the network will be offered.
Following this trend, it becomes increasingly important to give users the possibility of finding and making use of the services that are available in the network. Ideally, users would like to obtain access to services automatically, without requiring their system to be reconfigured. With the widespread deployment of network enabled mobile devices, such as: notebooks; Personal Data Assistants (PDAs); and enhanced cellular phones, dynamic discovery of services in a visited foreign network, for example, along with automatic system configuration and content translation, will be useful features.
Service Discovery Protocols (SDP) aim to reshape the way software and network resources are configured, deployed, and advertised. The focus is not only to provide a plug and play solution, but to provide an environment in which a device can automatically discover services, including their properties, in a dynamic fashion. Among the emerging SDPs are: Service Location Protocol (SLP), Salutation, Bluetooth, Jini, and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). Some of the goals for most of the SDPs are to: browse for services having certain attributes; choose the service based upon its attributes; and utilize the service.
Even though each SDP essentially has the same goal, all SDPs inherently have different origins, underlying technologies, flavors, and audiences. In other words, since the developers of these SDPs see the service discovery problem at different angles, the resulting solutions are often substantially divergent from one another. Accordingly, the browsing terminal must either: converse with only those Service Discovery Engines (SDE) that employ the browsing terminal's particular SDP; or conversely, bridge across all SDPs, such that proper service queries may take place regardless of the SDP currently executed by the SDE.
Once the services have been discovered, other compatibility issues arise once the service is ready for consumption. For example, two users having differing device capability may want to set up a video session, whereby the consuming user requires, for example, H.263 video format, while the service provider only offers, for example, the Motion Pictures Experts Group MPEG-2 video format. Without a video transcoder placed between the two users, the video session will not be possible, since a common Coder/Decoder (codec) will not be identified for use between the two users.
Other compatibility issues transparent to the consumer/service provider pair also exist in relation to the transport layer used to transport messages between the service consumer/provider applications. Currently, this layer may include the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), as well as the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) used for audio and video streaming services. Thus, as the number of services, content, and transport mechanisms integrated within the All-IP network increases, a universal translation mechanism used to facilitate such integration becomes increasingly advantageous.
Accordingly, there is a need in the communications industry for a system and method that facilitates such a comprehensive translation mechanism. The comprehensive translation mechanism should have the capability to provide a uniform and integrated service discovery experience for the user, while simultaneously allowing seamless content and transport translation as well.